#ness

If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#futility #shakespeare #shakespeare

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#greatness #misunderstood #philosophical

Today I will take the opportunity to do unanticipated good. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#good #inspirational #kindness #opportunity #experience

His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul. ↗

— J.M. Coetzee

#language #song #soul #speech #speech

...some say Twitter seems trite and lacks weightiness - but in actuality, it lends itself to poetry - it can be very compressed and intense... ↗

— John Geddes

#intense #poetry #trie #twitter #weightiness

When the girl returned, some hours later, she carried a tray, with a cup of fragrant tea steaming on it; and a plate piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb. The smell of that buttered toast simply talked to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one's ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender, of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries. ↗

— Kenneth Grahame

#coziness #meals #tea #toast #twitter

Don’t ever leave me again,” I said in a tiny voice. I won’t,” he promised into my hair, sounding most un-Fang-like. “I won’t. Not ever.” And just like that, a cold shard of ice that had been inside my chest ever since we’d split up-well, it just disappeared. I felt myself relax for the first time in I don’t known how long. The wind was chilly, but the sun was bright, and my whole flock was together. Fang and I were together. Excuse me? I’m alive too.” Iggy’s plaintive voice made me pull back. ↗

— James Patterson

#maxride #voice

Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness. ↗

— George Sand

#give #guard #hesitation #how #kindness

Selfishness and greed, individual or national, cause most of our troubles. ↗

— Harry S. Truman

#government #greed #national-troubles #problems #problems-in-the-world

The mind that opens to a new idea never returns to its original size. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#new-ideas #open-mindedness #originality